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Ability to Measure Store Visits Across Nearly 2,000 Businesses Now Freely Available through Placed Insights

Placed is making its location analytics platform, Placed Insights, available to the public at no cost. Launched in 2013, and utilized by hundreds of users across various industries including brick and mortar retail and restaurants, Placed Insights maps the real-world relationships between people and places.

“In the same way that Zillow’s Zestimate brought home value analytics to the masses, this evolution of Placed Insights will do the same for location analytics,” said David Shim, Founder and CEO at Placed. “We see very high demand for location analytics, yet adoption has been tempered by accessibility and cost to access an accurate and robust data set. Placed is taking the unprecedented step of education and investment in the industry by making location analytics available to all at no cost.”

Powered by 800 billion raw locations, 2.8 billion directly measured visits, and 94 million audited visits, Placed Insights to date has been a premium and paid service. With the announcement today, Placed is removing those barriers around Placed Insights, and open-sourcing access to one of the largest and most robust location analytics solutions in-market. Accessing Placed Insights is as simple as visiting placed.com, and entering any one of 1,900 businesses to garner robust location insights at no cost.

“When it comes to understanding the offline behavior of consumers, Placed is one of Taco Bell’s trusted partner,” said Lynn Hemans, Senior Director of Business and Social Intelligence. “Since partnering in 2016, Placed has been able to provide location analytics at a scale and accuracy that allows Taco Bell to take action against the data. In the past year, using Placed Attribution and Insights, Taco Bell has been able to deliver and optimize communication across media channels based on visitation.”

“Placed is a preferred location analytics and in-store attribution partner because of the scale of their privacy-compliant audience and the insights we uncover through their insights dashboard and cross-platform measurement solutions,” said Michele Siravo, VP, Managing Director, WHERE, at Horizon Media, Inc. “Access to Placed Insights has enabled us to enrich our strategic planning with location data – their foot traffic statistics are among a number of KPIs we ingest into Horizon’s proprietary data-driven integrated marketing platform, InfuseSM. Placed’s bold decision to open up its platform is an exciting opportunity for brands and agencies to gain a deeper understanding of their customers.”

The open-sourced version of Placed Insights will update on a monthly basis starting with January 2018. Insights generated from the platform include:

In addition to Placed Insights (Public, and Premium), Placed’s suite of products include Attribution, measuring the impact of ads on store visits, and Audience, enabling activation based on offline consumer behaviors.

Placed analyzed the location and visitation data generated by residents in the path of Hurricane Irma to gain insights into impacts of what has already proven to be an abnormally active storm season.

Foot Traffic to Businesses: Areas impacted by Hurricane Irma saw quantifiable increases in visitation to grocery stores (2.1x), gas/convenience (1.7x), and pharmacy (1.7x) in the days before expected landfall of Irma. While these visits were expected, unexpectedly visits to Pet Food and Supplies retailers, Diet & Nutritionists businesses, and Sporting Goods stores also saw increased visitation between September 4th through the 7th.

Restaurant/QSR locations saw up to 3.7x visitation rates by September 8th as residents began evacuation, or conserved supplies by eating out up until the last minute. Interestingly, Check Cashing locations saw upwards of 28X the visitation from prior to the hurricane, possibly due to banks being closed and power outages forcing cash only transactions. Wireless retailers also saw significant increases in visitation (1.5x-4x) before, during, and immediately following the storm.

Evacuations Before Landfall: By mapping “away from home” percentages by city by day, we clearly see the alignment to evacuation notices as well as delayed returns for areas where Hurricane Irma caused extended power outages.

Evacuations Start (Average): 2 days before landfall

Population Returns (Average): 3 days after landfall, 5 days after landfall for areas with extended power outages

Distance Traveled: The metric “distance traveled from home” indicates that the Sept 6th Hurricane Irma path projections, which placed the center of the storm traveling up the Eastern coastline, aligns with the first wave of residents of Miami and Naples opting to leave their home locations and travel distances averaging as much as 260 miles to escape the hurricanes cone of damage.

The September 7th announcement of mandatory evacuations for additional cities beginning Sept 8th initiated a second wave of residents departing with Ft Myers-Naples area seeing 73% of residents on the move.

Placed’s Top 100 monthly rankings of most visited businesses has been published for January 2017. The top categories to experience a climb in rankings this month include Automotive, Gas Stations, and QSR’s. Enterprise rose 17 spots to the 100th most visited business in January, whereas Sonic, Dairy Queen, and Valero each climbed 16 spots.

Dairy Queen, in addition to Baskin-Robbins (which increased by 15 ranking points) should be no surprise this month, as January marked the 18th warmest one on record in 123 years in the contiguous US.

Chevrolet Dealers and Ford Dealers, which each rose 11 spots and 9 spots respectively, experienced growth in foot traffic as January is tagged a favorable month to buy the most recent models of cars–sales are typically slow, and manufactures increase the price tag as the year goes on.

In terms of the biggest hits in rankings this month, the 25 businesses that experienced the largest drop in rankings all spanned the Retail category, a predictable trend given the end of the holiday shopping season. Retail businesses that declined the least in January 2017 rankings include The Home Depot, Dollar Tree, and the UPS Store, which each only dropped one spot from December. The 10 businesses to experience the largest declines on the list can be found below:

The differences between Trump and Clinton supporters extend beyond political view and into the apps that they are more likely to have installed on their smartphone. Utilizing Placed’s double opt-in audience, Placed was able to connect localized voting preferences to apps installed.

Using apps as a proxy, Clinton supporters are content generators with messaging and photo apps making up 70% of the list, while Trump supporters are more content consumers with 60% of the list including apps like NFL Mobile, Slacker Radio, Audible, Amazon Music, and Kindle. As it relates to retail, Trump supporters gravitate towards the market leaders with Walmart, the largest retailer in the US, and Amazon, the largest retailer in the US, representing 4 out of the top 10 apps.

For both candidates, the most popular businesses in the physical world by candidate preference have very little correlation with their supporters’ digital activities. This separation of offline versus online behaviors even for the same candidate highlights the importance of treating each medium in its own silo, as what works online isn’t necessarily going to work offline.

With Trump raising over $26MM in June through online and mail solicitations, it highlights digital as a strong channel to reach his strongest supporters and drive donations. Utilizing this list, Trump can focus fundraising efforts on apps where his supporters are most likely to be found. Clinton’s strength in social applications could represent an opportunity to replicate President Obama’s success in 2012 leveraging social media to drive donations.

Through a unique combination of location ratings service data and custom survey data, Placed was able to directly measure the change in visits to Chipotle during the frenzy following the restaurant’s E. coli outbreaks.

By analyzing location behaviors of consumers sourced from our Placed Insights service over a 13-month period, the data shows a drop in monthly Chipotle visitation that directly correlates with the outbreaks. Chipotle’s share in monthly traffic hit a low of 8.04% during the month of January 2016, a full three months after the first initial outbreak, representing the lowest visitor share over the 13-month period.

On February 8th, 2016, Chipotle shut down its nationwide stores to retrain staff on food safety. At the same time, the company launched a campaign to reintroduce customers to the brand with free burritos. Coupons worth a generous total of $70 million in free burritos were given away.

The “reintroduction period” with the support of millions of free burritos proved to be a promising tactic as Chipotle’s visitor share in Placed Insights for February and March show a gentle spike. More specifically, the burrito coupons pushed March 2016 visitor share to a level almost as high as that of the previous year (8.81% visitor share in March 2016 vs. 8.86% in March the year prior). Overall, the promotion had a material impact in winning back Chipotle customers.

Digging deeper into Placed Insights data reveals restaurants that benefited from Chipotle’s recent turmoil. In terms of visitor share within the Mexican restaurant category, there were a few notable beneficiaries:

Looking beyond this category, Placed compared two leaders of the “fast-casual revolution,” Chipotle and Panera Bread. Examining overlap in visitation rates through November 2015, Panera Bread visitors were more likely to visit Chipotle than vice versa. However, in December 2015, the visitation points meet, indicating a shift in traffic from Chipotle to Panera.

To add some color and tell the whole story behind the numbers, Placed surveyed its audience on their most recent visit to Chipotle to find the ways that public sentiment has changed for the brand:

46% had visited Chipotle within the last two weeks prior to their current visit

19% of respondents cited a free burrito coupon as the primary reason for their visit, while 46% said a craving for Chipotle drove their visit

70% are likely to visit Chipotle again within the next month

Over 90% are aware of the E. coli outbreaks, and among those who are aware, 79% visit about the same or more frequently since the news of the E. coli outbreak

Measuring the success of Chipotle’s strategy through free burrito coupons, Placed discovered that visitors who are less likely to frequent Chipotle due to the E. coli outbreaks are more likely to use Chipotle coupons than visitors whose visitation has increased or remained the same:

Among those who visit Chipotle less frequently due to the outbreaks, 23% used a free burrito coupon during their visit, which is 27% higher than those whose visits didn’t decrease during this time frame.

For coupon users who visit less frequently since the outbreaks, the majority said prior to this Chipotle visit, their last visit was within the last 6 months (29%) or more than 6 months ago (16%)

This group of users is also 61% likely to visit Chipotle in the next month

Chipotle’s approach to winning back customers with coupons shows signs of early success with directly measured foot traffic from Placed Insights, and perception metrics from Placed Survey.